Small composition choices decide whether a frame feels settled or slightly off, even when the scene looks “good enough.” If you rely on instinct and move on fast, you can miss the quiet fixes that turn a decent shot into one you actually want to keep.
Coming to you from Adam Gibbs, this measured video pushes you to treat the first setup as a draft, not a finish line. Gibbs describes that familiar moment: you drop the tripod, frame something quickly, and it almost works, but not quite. Instead of forcing a big change, he leans on tiny moves, inches left or right, a small tilt, a modest height change. You hear how he questions the frame in real time, not with rules, but with simple prompts like what happens if one branch leaves the edge or if a rock stops touching the border. That approach matters when you keep coming home with files that feel “close,” because the gap is often a handful of tiny decisions you did not bother to test.
He also gets specific about camera position in space, not just where you stand. A small shift changes how shapes overlap, how a background cleans up, or how two elements stop competing. Height plays into it in a way you can miss in the field, especially when you are locked into one tripod section out of habit. The video gives you a practical mindset: take near-identical frames on purpose so you can compare later and learn what your eye keeps skipping. The part that sticks is his focus on edges, since that is where distractions hide, like bright slivers pulling attention out of the frame or a clipped object that feels accidental. If you only judge the center, you can end up defending a composition that keeps nagging at you when you review it at home.
Midway through, the conversation shifts into a different kind of refinement that people rarely talk about out loud. You hear how hierarchy shows up through small choices, not grand gestures: what leads, what supports, what gets reduced, and what gets removed. He touches on orientation and aspect ratio as decisions driven by feel, then hints at how he tests both directions even when one seems obvious. There is also a surprisingly blunt point about not taking the photo at all, and how walking away is still part of the work when the scene refuses to click. He ties that to time, since micro changes take patience and stillness, and stillness can feel awkward when the light is changing and you want to “get something” before it’s gone. He frames the whole process as a set of quiet questions you ask yourself while the camera is already on the tripod, then leaves you with a way to pressure-test your own habits the next time you set up in a rush. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Gibbs.